Revising Talmy’s typology of motion events in the light of Chinese

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Abstract

Talmy (1975, 1985, 1991 and 2000b) studies Motion events encoded by verbs from the
perspective of lexicalisation(T). Talmy (2000b) proposes six basic semantic elements to
describe Motion events; they are Figure, Motion, Path, Ground, Manner, and Cause. For
example, in the sentence He entered the room, enter is the main verb and encodes Motion
“move” and Path “into”. So the main verb encodes the Path information. Such phenomena
are very common in Spanish; however, in English and in Chinese Path is usually expressed
by satellites, a category of surface element. Enter is exceptional in English. Although it is a
word in English it was borrowed from French. The surface elements which encode the Path
information determine a language’s type. For example, if Path is encoded by main verbs in
language A, then this language A is a verb-framed language; if Path is typically expressed by
satellites in language B, then language B is a satellite-framed language. These are the two
most widespread types of languages in this typology. According to Talmy, English is a
satellite-framed language (S-framed language); Spanish a verb-framed language (V-framed
language); and Chinese a satellite-framed language.
Slobin (1996, 1997, 2002, 2004 and 2006) argues that Chinese is an equipollent-framed
language (E-framed language), a third language type he added to Talmy’s typology. The
evidence for this is the serial verb construction (SVC) in Chinese. SVCs can be briefly
defined as a syntactic pattern where two or more verbs are used together to express a single
conceptual event and there are no markers of subordination and coordination. Slobin uses feī
chū (fly exit) as an example of the SVC and he insists that feī (fly) and chū (exit) share the
same grammatical status and are equal to each other in that neither of them can be omitted
for a complete expression of the event of flying out. The first verb encodes the Manner
information and the latter one expresses the Path information. Omitting either part, the
expression is ungrammatical.
Having briefly reviewed these two models of language typology, many questions have arisen.
Is it necessary to have a third language type to account for Chinese? Or is Chinese an Eframed
language or a S-framed language? What is the language typology of Chinese? This is
the main research question I aim to answer in this thesis. The main question concerns the
nature of Chinese SVCs. In my thesis, I discuss the features of Chinese SVCs as preparation
for a working definition of SVC for my empirical work to collect the SVC data from the
Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC). I show that the components in Chinese
SVCs are not equal in semantics. There are constraints on the positions for different semantic
parameters. In addition, the surface forms of components for SVCs do not share equal status
for the asymmetrical SVCs. This further shows that components within Chinese SVCs are
not in equal grammatical status.
My data shows that Path can be encoded by main verbs as well as by satellites in Chinese.
Having illustrated that Chinese SVC is not evidence for Chinese to be an E-framed language,
then, is Chinese a S-framed language similar to English or a V-framed language like Spanish?
Özçalışkan (2004) claims that Path verbs, verbs encoding [Motion + Path], is a closed class.
How many Path verbs are there in Chinese and are these Path verbs comparable with those in
English and in Spanish? I give a comprehensive list of Chinese Path verbs and then focus on
some of them to track the process of the lexicalisation(T). I found that there are no significant
differences in number for the 13 types of Path verbs in Chinese, English and Spanish and
that the lexicalised(T) Path is comparable. These findings indicate that Chinese uses both
main verbs and satellites to express the Path information in motion events. Additionally, the
grammaticalization trend of Chinese Path verbs and the shift from independent Path verbs
into Path satellites and grammatical relation markers also show that Chinese is not part of
any of the parallel system, the split system, or the intermixed system for expressing motion
events. Chinese is in the transferring period from a S-framed language to a V-framed
language.